The "I remember series Part I"

Ration books still being used-families all close by in one suburb – plenty of cousins to play with. Individual slate boards used in school and old wooden desks scratched to hell. Cow heel soup and tripe being on the regular weekly menu and no one dared say “I don’t like this”! one or two TV’s owned by neighbours and we would stand outside their windows watching etc etc………

We all knew it was the end for Hitler when he sent a V2 down our street just after my  birthday, and my cards and presents were covered in soot! While I had a tantrum , my dad ,who was home on leave while his ship was being repaired, said "There!  Britain's answer to Hitler".
I can remember crawling into the Morrison shelter with my mom all cuddled up in blankets and the sound of a siren still makes me jump.

It was 1944 and I was 7. The gang in our street were playing cowboys and Indians - us cowboys captured an indian and tied him to a lamp post in the next street. We then forgot all about it - as you do.

We got into plenty of trouble over that I can tell you

street lamps that we played under after dusk with full safety not sure if they were gas or electric - gas I think? - coal fires of course - my grandmother had a hearth [metal -need I say] set into the wall in the kitchen where you could cook scones in the side oven. No fridges and first black and white TV set [very small] our playing field was a bombed site where we enacted games and fantasies with just some bricks and a piece of chalk to draw on cricket stumps!

Being a demob leave baby in 1946, I am a touch younger than you big boys, so don’t have any wartime recall. 


However, I do remember ox heart being the Sunday roast and tripe being a regular too.  No butter for us, margarine was on our bread.  Fried bread was cooked in lard in a deep fat fryer.  I loved toast cooked on a long fork in front of the red glow of the open fire.


A tent to play in was made by using the clothes-airer covered with a blanket.  Hopscotch, skipping and hide & seek were regular entertainments.  Street sports in the summer between ours and neighbouring streets.


My father would take me across the field next to our home to collect mushrooms and watercress.

I can recall my mother sitting up close to the coal fire - all her legs would go red mottled in the heat.

corner shops that we now call delis but they were just the corner shop or Bills place - some were quite large and carried a range of good food - others smaller - the bell would ring as we enter and the someone would come out from the back room to serve. there was one large store on the main street and the money would be put in containers then into a shoot and air shot to the main office

They still use the air shoot containers in our Tesco from the check outs.

In our Masons grocers during the war - the money and receipt was put into little lidded container suspended from a zip wire which led to a central cashier. There were several assistants each with their own zip wire. There was a lever the assistant pulled down and the container,  shot across the shop to the cashier who counted it and returned the change/receipt to the assistant.

AlanHo wrote:

They still use the air shoot containers in our Tesco from the check outs.

In our Masons grocers during the war - the money and receipt was put into little lidded container suspended from a zip wire which led to a central cashier. There were several assistants each with their own zip wire. There was a lever the assistant pulled down and the container,  shot across the shop to the cashier who counted it and returned the change/receipt to the assistant.

I can still remember those Alan. I'm only 28 years old. 

I can remember butter being scooped off a big block and dolloped onto greaseproof paper and being patted into a small block before being wrapped.

We didn't have a fridge but we had a pantry with a concrete slab across the end intended to keep stuff cool. My mother had a butter cooler - which was a crock dish with a lid with a rim around it which you part fill with water. The latent heat of evaporation was supposed to keep the butter cool. It didn't - and the butter would invariably go slightly rancid after a few days. I can still remember the taste.

I remember us all sitting down for dinner and having bowls of cow heel soup with spuds and carrots and tripe for afters!

AlanHo wrote:

I can remember butter being scooped off a big block and dolloped onto greaseproof paper and being patted into a small block before being wrapped.

We didn't have a fridge but we had a pantry with a concrete slab across the end intended to keep stuff cool. My mother had a butter cooler - which was a crock dish with a lid with a rim around it which you part fill with water. The latent heat of evaporation was supposed to keep the butter cool. It didn't - and the butter would invariably go slightly rancid after a few days. I can still remember the taste.

We had one of those concrete slabs as well Alan. Although I think most people would have had them in those days. I remember Dad coming in with a piece of Marble, about three by three foot and putting it on top of the concrete in the bottom of the pantry. It was about an inch thick and saying "Stuff should last a bit longer on that", and it did. It had something to do with the marble staying cool because of it's properties, even in the summer Month's.

We could never have afforded marble. My parents couldn't even afford to buy me or my brother marbles - we had to make do with ball bearings nicked from the scrap at a local engineering works.

When I came back to NZ in 1967, there were no wineries that I wanted to know- they were all making cheap plonk for local consumption, like extra strength sweet sherry- the quickest and cheapest way of falling down known to man. So I went to work on a sheep and cattle farm near Waipawa, (where I live now in retirement) we had to stock the larder so we went to town to the local 'Stock & Station" store. They sold everything from groceries to tractors. It was still in the era of the shop getting the things on your list and putting them in cardboard boxes. When we had filled about 4 boxes with stuff, I asked the clerk if it was OK to pay by cheque. He looked blankly at me and said "You wanna pay for it? Don't you wanna charge it?" He didn't know us from a bar of soap but he was prepared to help us out to the car with goodies. We found out later that nearly everybody had an account and paid once a month. Some of the 'cockies' (farmers) paid once a year!

I remember Perth 34 yrs ago [no not Scotland - WA] a sleepy little hollow that the eastern states giggled at - all the shops closed at midday on Saturdays for the footie - it turned from a sleepy hollow to a ghost town with wild yelling coming from behind closed curtains!